The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  They rode along a few stops in silence. Bupandan women, their heads wrapped in colorful scarves, got off and on, dragging three or four children behind.

  “I guess it can be tough if you’re like them,” Cricket said, “if you have kids. Do you have any kids?”

  “None that I know of,” Wilson said.

  They got off the bus at the corner of Lowry and Cantor and walked over into the Bend to the army-navy surplus place on Allen Street. There, Wilson picked out a compass and jackknife, a dual-lens flashlight, a large canvas duffel bag, a rain poncho, deck shoes, several sweaters permeated with a waxy, waterproof substance, cans of insect repellent, and, at Cricket’s insistence, a pair of army-issue night-vision goggles.

  These odd binoculars reminded Wilson of an old-fashioned stereopticon, the Victorian visual toy that made images of famous places and people look three-dimensional, and he recalled the stereopticon and box of slides he had found at the bottom of a mildewed trunk in the attic of his great-aunt’s house in Warwick years ago. He had stayed at the old woman’s house on forlorn holidays away from the Catholic orphanage-school where she had sent him after his mother’s death. And now, as he fitted the night-vision goggles across the bridge of his nose, he half expected to see some of those old sepia slides again: Queen Victoria, President Taft, Fatty Arbuckle, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Sphinx in Egypt, the lobby of the Empire Hotel in Parkerville, complete with spittoons, overstuffed sofas, and potted palms.

  But the night-vision goggles showed only a few vague shapes outlined in hazy static.

  “These are no good,” Wilson said.

  Cricket took them off his face, made a few adjustments, peered through the eyepieces at the cash register overhung by the canopy of a World War II—era silk parachute. “They’re fine,” she said. “It just has to be dark for them to work properly.”

  “One hundred seventy-five bucks!” Wilson fingered the price tag.

  “You never know when someone will come at you in the dark,” Cricket said, and threw them into the basket.

  Outside again, along Allen Street, Wilson paused at a secondhand bookstall and picked out a few of the longest volumes he could find: An old Modern Library version of Don Quixote, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Caulaincourt’s With Napoleon in Russia, Steadman’s History of World War One, and a lurid fifties-era paperback edition of Manon Lescaut—described in hysterical jacket copy as a novel of “betrayal and obsessive love”—by the eighteenth-century French priest, the Abbé Prévost.

  Cricket stood by, her arms crossed in disgust. “Dead weight,” she said when Wilson stepped over with his bag of books.

  “I’m not going on an eighteen-month voyage without anything to read,” Wilson said.

  “You think you’re going to have time to read?” Cricket said. “Minute I catch you reading, we stick a mop in your hand.”

  “You’re anti-intellectual,” Wilson said.

  “No,” Cricket said. “I’m just anti that shit, whatever it is that’s turned you inside out.”

  3

  It wasn’t until they reached the worn stone steps of the Mariners’ Union that the reality of the situation hit him. Wilson felt his chest contract, and he sank to the bottom step, short of breath. Annoyed and concerned at once, Cricket stared down at him.

  “What’s wrong now?” she said.

  Wilson’s white face was reflected in the darkness of her sunglasses. He made an inarticulate gesture. The stained Beaux Arts-era Mariners’ Union Hall rose up behind like the ruins of an ancient fortress. From bathtub-shaped niches in the facade, greening bronze statues of the great mariners stared out, their empty eyes full of the sea. There was Columbus holding the terrestrial globe, Magellan with astrolabe and sword, Sir Francis Drake cradling a model of the Golden Hind, Captain Cook peering through a telescope that had long since rusted from his hands.

  Cricket sighed, unshouldered her bag, and sat on the steps beside him. “Everything’s arranged,” she said. “All you have to do is go inside and sign your name on the dotted line—Lander, Wilson, ordinary seaman. Vessel, Compound Interest, bound for Rangoon and points east—and tomorrow at this time all the crap will be behind you.”

  She meant the city and its streets thick with people, the world full of complications, and roads leading to and fro across undulations of landscape—the entirety of Wilson’s life on solid ground.

  “I can’t go,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry.”

  “What about all the stuff you just bought?” Cricket said.

  “You can have it.”

  “Don’t do this,” Cricket said.

  “Tell me one thing,” Wilson said. “Why me?”

  Cricket looked at him through her sunglasses, then she looked away. “These long voyages can be really lonely,” she said at last. “No one to talk to, no one to … Well, let’s just say that I liked your face the day you came into Nancy’s store with those ridiculous tarot cards. You seemed lost. Right then, I decided to take you away with me. And there’s something else. A practical reason.”

  “What?”

  “Guess.”

  “No.”

  “I need a good gambler in my life.”

  “Why?”

  She gave an ambiguous shrug. “I’ll tell you later about that,” she said. “When I know you better. Call it the story of my life.”

  “Cricket, I’m not—”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” she cut him short. “It was beginner’s luck. O.K., maybe you could say that about the dogs last week, but not about the cockfights last night. My God, you were brilliant.

  “Almost got myself killed.”

  “But you didn’t. You were brave.”

  “I was scared shitless.”

  “That’s what being brave is all about.”

  Wilson put his head on his knees and was silent for a while. The grime of the city filled the cracks in the old stone. Across the street a construction site pounded away, sunlight on the red-brown musty earth dug up by a backhoe. Such places always made him shudder. He closed his eyes and saw a black girder falling through the sky. Then Cricket put her hand on his shoulder, and the girder vanished before it hit pavement, and Wilson opened his eyes and looked up. She was standing above him, sun behind her coppery hair like a halo, one thick hand extended.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “You don’t really know anything about me,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of time ahead of us for that.”

  Wilson stood up and took Cricket’s hand, and she pulled him over to the bronze mermaids that guard the portals of the Mariners’ Union, their bronze breasts worn to a dull metallic sheen by generations of sailors copping a feel.

  “Go ahead,” Cricket said. “Kiss her tit. This one’s Stormy; that one’s Windy. You get your choice.”

  “You’re kidding,” Wilson said.

  “No,” Cricket said. “You’ve got to kiss it. Been a tradition for all first timers for years. Brings good luck on the voyage.”

  Wilson felt stupid about it, but he did what she said. He kissed the bare metal nipple of the nearest mermaid to a faint acrid, brassy taste. Cricket laughed and took his hand again, and they crossed the threshold together into the echoing shadows of the union hall.

  4

  In the evening, the wind blew high and steady from the southeast. The sky was touched with green and gold below the dark layer of night. Waves beat against the seawall. The moon pulled the tides of the world. All roads seemed to lead away from home. Duffel bag over his shoulder, Wilson felt the dread curled inside him like a sleeping animal, but he also felt calm and resolved. He walked with Cricket along the boardwalk on Blackpool Island. Black rocks, some large as boulders, led down to the dark water. Aluminum fishing skiffs rocked violently on the waves at their moorings below the pier. Wilson saw the faint silhouette of a departing tanker on the horizon.

  They went to Ba
zzano’s at the far end of the Blackpool Amusement Pier. Cricket chose a table on the bricks beneath the lights of the loggia, which is open to the sea. A few hipsters slumped at the old tin-topped bar inside, drinking espresso and smoking French cigarettes. The waiter was a squat Peruvian man with a face the color of a beet. He seemed distraught when they both ordered steaks; no one orders steak at Bazzano’s which was famous for its Italian-style seafood. The restaurant was an institution in the city: Open continually since 1908, its walls were decorated with scenes of the simple life in a Sicilian fishing village, painted in bright, fanciful colors that had faded with the century. After a decade or so of decline and a diminishing tourist trade, Bazzano’s had caught on with the young, artsy set that lived in the garrets and lofts of the Bend. The Terminal Street Ferry made the round trip four times a night, bringing Bend bohemians shambling up from the foot of the pier with their sideburns, their ancient thrift store suits, their vague hopes, their beautiful tattooed women fleeing the possibility of life in the suburbs. Bazzano’s, Wilson had read recently in the Life section of the Dispatch, was one of the last unvarnished relics of the city our grandparents knew, a metropolis full of gangsters and socialites, bootleg gin, cigarettes, lipstick, and love affairs. Not exactly true, Wilson thought, but modern life was so relentlessly unromantic, and Bazzano’s had somehow managed to maintain a certain atmosphere.

  The steaks were a long time coming. The Peruvian waiter sent a Peruvian boy, perhaps his son, who explained that the steaks had been fetched up from the basement freezer, were hard as rocks, and needed to thaw a bit more before cooking.

  “Don’t you people have a microwave?” Cricket said. “Stick the steaks in and switch on the defrost setting.”

  “No microwave,” the boy said.

  “Maybe we should change our order to scallops,” Wilson said.

  Cricket shook her head. “No way,” she said. “How much steak do you think we’ll get in eighteen months at sea?”

  “I thought Friday night was steak night on every self-respecting sailboat,” Wilson said.

  “Funny,” Cricket said.

  They didn’t speak for a while. The dark deepened, but there was still a glow behind the skyline in the west. Wilson felt shy and didn’t know what to say. The animal in his gut woke a little and began gnawing at his resolve. Then the steaks came, and they were a little charred but not bad, and there was the house red wine in a carafe and a side order of thick spaghetti.

  “I’m really doing this,” Wilson said almost to himself.

  “Look in your wallet,” Cricket said.

  Wilson looked through his card carrier and pulled out the new laminated seaman’s identification card. The terrible photograph made him look like a murderer or someone who had just gotten out of bed.

  Cricket held the picture to the light and smiled. “There you are,” she said.

  “O.K.,” Wilson said, “but what about my apartment, all my possessions—”

  “Nancy will take care of the place for you,” Cricket said. “She’s going over Saturday to put your personal stuff in boxes. She’s always got someone from her coven blowing into town, some sorcerer’s apprentice. The place will be rented within the week.”

  Wilson finished his steak; then he cleared his throat. “Cricket, there’s something else,” he said.

  Cricket narrowed her eyes. “You’re not married? You don’t strike me as a married man, unless that messy bachelor apartment of yours is some kind of scam.”

  “That’s not quite it,” Wilson said.

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Five years.”

  “Shit.”

  “But it hasn’t been going too well lately.”

  “You better call her. I’ll wait.”

  5

  Wilson went inside to use the phone booth in the breezeway between the kitchen and the bathroom. A cook in a stained white jacket smoked a cigarette at the back door open to the night and the sea. More kids playing beatnik had filled up the stools at the bar. A young woman with blue hair did a strange writhing dance while two body-pierced men clapped their hands. In the dining room a blond German tourist couple sat eating the house specialty of scallops steamed in garlic and wine. Wilson’s face felt hot, though the night was cool for September.

  The phone rang in Andrea’s apartment five times, six times. He was about to hang up, maybe send a telegram from some fly-infested, dusty city on the African coast, when Andrea picked up the receiver, out of breath.

  “Hello?”

  “Andrea …”

  “Wilson, sorry, I just got in with some groceries. Hold on a minute.”

  He waited, his palms sweating.

  When she picked up again, she said quickly, “Listen, I want you to know I’m not mad at you for not showing up at work today. You probably needed a break. I think I’m too hard on you sometimes, O.K.?”

  One of the would-be beatniks at the bar took up a harmonica and the blue-haired young woman began singing in a high-pitched crazy voice.

  “Where are you?” Andrea said.

  “Bazzano’s.”

  “What are you doing all the way out there?”

  Wilson didn’t know how to begin, then he blurted out, “Andrea, I’m going away.” Silence.

  “Andrea, did you hear what I said?”

  “I heard you,” Andrea said. “It just took a minute to sink in.” Her voice was calm and flat.

  “Things haven’t been good with us, not for a long time. We both know that,” Wilson said. “There’s nothing in my life right now that makes me happy. We fight, we make up, we fight, we make up. It’s always the same. I get on the same bus; the same files are sitting on my computer at work. I feel like I can’t breathe. I need a change.”

  “So where are you going?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, I guess not. How long?”

  Wilson hesitated. “A year, two. Maybe longer.”

  There was a sudden crash, then the staticky sound of fumbling for the receiver. “You call me to tell me you’re leaving for two years?” Andrea’s voice came back angry a moment later. “After all the crap we’ve been through together, you tell me you’re leaving me over the phone?”

  “I’m sorry it worked out this way,” Wilson said. “But I just don’t have time to hash things out in person. I’m leaving in a couple of hours.”

  All at once, Andrea began to sob in great, broken gasps. Wilson listened, his stomach twisting in knots.

  “Andrea, please,” he said at last. “I’m really sorry. I feel like hell about this.”

  “You feel like hell? It’s always about you, isn’t it? You bastard, you—” But she couldn’t finish. The sobbing went on for another few minutes, then subsided. “Wilson, I love you,” she said, her voice calmer. “I know we don’t talk about things. We need to talk more. I always thought we’d get married. I was sure of it. I’ve just been waiting for you to find out what you want to do with your life. That’s all. I thought you’d decide to go back to school, something like that. That’s what’s making you miserable! Not me, not us! You don’t know what to do with yourself. Running away isn’t going to help.”

  “It’s all I’ve got right now, Andrea,” Wilson said.

  “Let’s talk about this in person, O.K.? Maybe we could go to couples counseling. Things will get better, I know they will.”

  “It’s too late,” Wilson said.

  “Is there someone else? Are you there with someone else?”

  “No,” Wilson lied.

  “You’re lying,” she said, and started to sob again. The sound was like a knife turning in his gut. When the conversation ended a half hour later, he found his face was wet with tears. He could still hear Andrea’s last, frightened whisper.

  “You’re not coming back to me; you’re never coming back to me. I thought after all these years—I thought you—”

  But Wilson did not catch the rest because the line went dead. Whether she hung up on him or there was a p
roblem with the connection, he never knew. He leaned into the fetid booth and squeezed his eyes shut and tried to hold in his tears with the palm of his hand. He had not expected this pain, these tears, but he couldn’t say whether leaving Andrea or change itself had caused the reaction. He realized now that he hated change more than anything else in the world; change meant death and sadness. He hated change as much as he was drawn to it. Suddenly he remembered a vacation trip to Maine he and Andrea had taken three years before, when things had been good between them: On the way up they had pulled over somewhere in rural New England and spent the night in the car. They woke at dawn and walked out into a dew-wet field of waist-high wildflowers and made love there, surrounded by red and purple blooms, the sky bright as hope above. He could still remember the feel of her body beneath his, her breath close in his ear. No. It was best not to think of those things. He dried his face on his sleeve and went back out onto the loggia.

  One arm hooked over the back of her chair, Cricket smoked a harsh foreign cigarette that she had bummed from someone at the bar. Another bottle of red wine sat half empty on the table. She looked up as Wilson approached, a long, appraising look, with something dangerous hidden in the depths.

  “So, it’s done?” she said when he sat down.

  Wilson nodded miserably. He felt so rotten he could hardly speak.

  “Hey, Wilson,” Cricket said. She took his wrist tightly in her hand callused as any farmer’s, pulled him over, and kissed him hard on the lips. Wilson’s first impulse was to pull away; then he felt her breasts through the striped top, and he didn’t pull away. She drew her lips off his after a minute or so, panting a little, but stayed close enough for Wilson to smell the cigarette and the wine on her breath.